What Are Business Units?

Business units represent the organizational entities within your financial model. Depending on your organization, these might be subsidiaries, divisions, departments, geographic regions, product lines, or any other meaningful segmentation of the business.

The purpose of defining business units is to enable segmented analysis -- seeing financial results broken down by organizational entity -- and consolidation -- rolling up results across entities into a combined view.

Single-Entity vs. Multi-Unit Mode

Single-Entity Mode

If you are modeling a single company or project with no need for organizational segmentation, select Single Entity mode. This creates one business unit called "Main" and keeps the model simple. Every account, every data record, and every calculation belongs to this single unit.

Single-entity mode is appropriate for:

• Standalone company valuations
• Single-project financial models
• Small businesses without divisional structure
• Simplified planning models

Multi-Unit Mode

If your model needs to represent multiple organizational entities, select Multi-Unit mode. This allows you to define any number of named business units, each appearing as its own column (or column group) in account worksheets.

Multi-unit mode is appropriate for:

• Holding companies with subsidiaries
• Corporations with divisional reporting
• Regional breakdowns (e.g., "North America", "Europe", "Asia")
• Product line analysis (e.g., "Hardware", "Software", "Services")
• Any scenario requiring consolidated and segmented views

Defining Business Units

In multi-unit mode, each business unit has:

Name

A descriptive label identifying the unit (e.g., "Manufacturing Division", "Retail Operations", "Brazil Subsidiary"). This name appears as a column header in the generated Excel worksheets.

Choose names that are concise but unambiguous. They will appear in narrow column headers, so extremely long names may be truncated in the workbook display.

Order

Business units are listed in the order you define them. This order determines the left-to-right arrangement of unit columns in the generated worksheets. Place the most important or most-referenced units first.

How Units Appear in the Generated Model

Account Worksheets

In the generated Excel model, each account worksheet includes one data column per business unit per period. For example, if you have 3 business units and 10 periods, each account row has 30 value cells (3 units x 10 periods).

The Analysis Worksheet

The model automatically generates an Analysis worksheet that consolidates data across all business units. This worksheet sums (or otherwise aggregates) unit-level data to provide the total enterprise view. It is the primary worksheet for consolidated financial statements.

Units Included Control

The generated model includes a Units Included control worksheet (or control section) that allows the Excel user to toggle individual units on or off at runtime. This is powerful for ad-hoc analysis: you can exclude a unit to see what the consolidated results look like without it, or isolate a single unit for focused review.

How Units Connect to Other Sections

• Database -- The "Unit" column mapping in the Database section tells the engine which column in your data file identifies the business unit. Unit identifiers in the data must match the unit names defined here.
• Business Cases -- Cases define specific combinations of business units for focused analysis. A case might include only domestic units, or only operating units excluding corporate overhead.
• Accounts -- Every account in the chart of accounts has data for each business unit. The account structure is the same across all units; only the values differ.
• Sources -- Data sources are independent of business units. A single data source (e.g., "Budget") can contain records for all units.

Common Organizational Structures

By Legal Entity

| Unit | Description | |------|-------------| | Parent Co | The holding company | | Sub A | First subsidiary | | Sub B | Second subsidiary | | Sub C | Third subsidiary |

By Geography

| Unit | Description | |------|-------------| | Domestic | Home market operations | | LATAM | Latin American operations | | EMEA | Europe, Middle East, Africa | | APAC | Asia-Pacific region |

By Business Line

| Unit | Description | |------|-------------| | Products | Product sales and manufacturing | | Services | Professional and managed services | | Licensing | Software licensing and royalties |

Best Practices

1. Start simple. If you are unsure whether you need multiple units, start with single-entity mode. You can restructure later, but unnecessary units add complexity to every worksheet.
2. Keep unit names short. These names become column headers in Excel. Names longer than 15-20 characters may not display well.
3. Match unit names to your data. If your data file uses "DIV_01" as the unit identifier, your business unit should be named "DIV_01" (or you should adjust the data before import).
4. Limit the number of units. Each unit multiplies the number of columns in every account worksheet. More than 8-10 units can make the workbook very wide and difficult to work with.
5. Use consistent naming across models. If you build multiple models for the same organization, use the same unit names to enable cross-model comparison.